A chance encounter with Roland the Brave

The sittingroom of our house when I was growing up was known as “the front room” and was kept scrupulously clean and tidy. It was for guests, special occasions and best behaviour – no shoes allowed, slippers only! But the back wall of the room was covered in shelving and a library of books showed themselves off, competing for our attention – sets of encyclopedias; Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians; history books; Everyman novels; a complete set of Dickens; The Waverley novels, and more.

But one set of books especially attracted me then – a 10-volume set of Newnes Pictorial Knowledge, in particular volume five. The second half of this volume was devoted to fable, myth and legend: tales from the Greek; the Iliad and the Odyssey; fables from Aesop; Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm; tales from the Norse; of King Arthur and the Round Table; Robin Hood; Aladdin; Brer Rabbit; and, my favourite, The Song of Roland.

Simplified from the famous 11th century French “chanson de geste”, it told the story of two friends, Roland and Oliver, warriors in King Charlemagne’s army, and of the treachery of Count Ganelon that leads to their death at the Battle of Roncesvaux Pass in 778AD.

There were black and white illustrations, including one full-page picture, near the end, of the dying Roland on his knees having failed, through pride and stubbornness, to blow his horn Oliphant for reinforcements. His sword Durindal was clutched in his right hand, Oliphant in his left, two fatal arrows protruding from his back, his head bowed in his winged helmet, the blood drained from his face. To my childhood eyes this figure was the epitome of the tragic hero, and stayed in my mind long after those books, those shelves, and that front room had gone ...

Balkan diplomacy – Frank McNally on hosting a Bulgarian journalist for election weekend

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Rock of ages – Ray Burke on Molly Bloom, Gibraltar and Galway

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Hibernian idyll – Oliver O’Hanlon on Patrick Leigh Fermor in Waterford

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Cracking over the papers – Frank McNally on uncomfortable parallels between column writing and the Leaving Cert

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Some 30 years later, I was working on a theatre production in Belfast of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, a Theatre of the Absurd piece given an especially bonkers production by the company Kabosh. We would take it to the Edinburgh Festival, to London’s Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and back to Belfast’s Lagan Weir Tunnel, believe it or not, under the river. The show was an immersive, not to say claustrophobic, experience for the audience, limited to 30-40, who would occupy the small specially-built box set with us, sitting on stools, suitcases, piles of newspapers and books. Towards the end of the show there was one seven-minute scene played in darkness where my character turned into a rhinoceros – as you do – growing, rather than blowing, my own imagined horn.

Our cramped set had a number of bundles of books scattered around, tied or glued together, and one day during rehearsals in the Old Museum Arts Centre one particular red volume caught my eye. I bent down and looked at the spine: Newnes Pictorial Knowledge and, a gasp of breath later, below it, the figure five. With more than a little trepidation, I lifted out the book and opened it, and flicked through the pages until I reached page 427. And there it was. My eyes filled up again at the picture of Roland the Brave in front of me.

The illustrations were commissioned especially for the book, and I had never known the artist’s name. Only recently I found out a little about him. His name was Christopher Gifford Ambler. Born in Bradford in 1886 he did evening classes at Leeds School of Art before going to London to work as an illustrator. He then went to the US and fought in France in the first World War – where a foot injury put paid to an amateur boxing career, so he refereed instead – and he was best known for his illustrations of dogs and horses. He died in 1965 in Abingdon near Oxford. And that’s all I know.

He may not have been at the level of an Arthur Rackham or Sir John Tenniel, but for me, and my childhood, he holds a special place. When our production of Rhinoceros came to an end I was allowed to take the coveted volume five of Newnes Pictorial Knowledge home, where it now sits on my own book shelves in my own sittingroom.